Elections to the Baseball Hall of Fame for 2015 proceeded according to rules most recently amended in 2014. As in the past, the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA) voted by mail to select from a ballot of recently retired players, with results announced on January 6, 2015. Randy Johnson, Pedro Martínez, John Smoltz and Craig Biggio were elected to the Hall of Fame. It was the first time since that the BBWAA elected four players in one year.
The Golden Era Committee, one of three voting panels by era that replaced the more broadly defined Veterans Committee following an earlier rules change in July 2010, convened at Major League Baseball's winter meetings in San Diego on December 8, 2014, to select from a ballot of 10 retired players and non-playing personnel who made their greatest contributions to the sport between 1947 and 1972. None of these candidates received enough votes to be elected.
The Hall of Fame induction ceremonies were held on July 26 at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, with new commissioner Rob Manfred presiding for the first time. On the day before the actual induction ceremony, the annual Hall of Fame Awards Presentation took place. At that event, two awards for media excellence were presented – the Hall's Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasters and the BBWAA's J. G. Taylor Spink Award for writers. The other major Hall of Fame award, the Buck O'Neil Lifetime Achievement Award, was not scheduled to be presented again until 2017. Among the other portions of the ceremonies was a presentation by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus honoring the service of baseball personnel in World War II; he also announced the naming of the littoral combat ship USS Cooperstown.
BBWAA election
On July 26, 2014, the Hall of Fame announced revisions to the rules for recently retired players, decreasing the number of years a player can be on the ballot from 15 to 10. Three candidates presently on the BBWAA ballot (Lee Smith, Don Mattingly and Alan Trammell) in years 10-15 were grandfathered into this system and retained their previous 15 years of eligibility. In addition, BBWAA members who were otherwise eligible to cast ballots were required to complete a registration form and sign a code of conduct before receiving their ballots, and the Hall made public the names of all members who cast ballots (but not their individual votes) when it announced the election results. The code of conduct specifically states that the ballot is non-transferable, a direct reaction to Dan Le Batard's actions in the 2014 balloting process. Violation of the code of conduct will result in a lifetime ban from BBWAA voting.
The ballot included two categories of players: Candidates from the 2014 ballot who received at least 5% of the vote but were not elected, as long as they first appeared on the BBWAA ballot no earlier than 2001. Selected individuals, chosen by a screening committee, whose last appearance was in 2009.
There were 549 total ballots cast and 4623 individual votes for players, for an average of 8.4 players named per ballot.
All BBWAA members with at least 10 years of continuous membership were eligible to vote. One member of the 2014 electorate, Dan Le Batard, was suspended from the BBWAA for a year (which automatically made him ineligible to cast a vote in this election) and also banned for life from voting in any future Hall of Fame election after he revealed that he had turned over his 2014 ballot to Deadspin and allowed the website's readers to make selections.
As in most recent elections, the controversy over use of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) dominated the election. ESPN.com columnist Jim Caple noted in the days before the announcement of the 2012 results that the PED issue and the BBWAA's limit of 10 votes per ballot was likely to result in a major backlog in upcoming elections:
Caple's predictions about the players on the 2015 ballot, as well as the players he expected to be elected before then, mostly proved accurate. Larkin was indeed elected in 2012, and Maddux, Glavine and Thomas were elected on their first ballot appearance in 2014. The main exceptions were Palmeiro and Williams, who got less than 5% of the vote in prior elections and failed to stay on, and Biggio, who fell short of election in both of his first two years on the ballot, missing out in 2014 by two votes.
Another ESPN.com writer, Tim Kurkjian, noted that the 2013 ballot would include several new candidates who either tested positive or were strongly linked to PEDs:
Don Mattingly was on the ballot for the 15th and final time.